Related Post: Who is an Evangelical? Part 1
Some of you looking for a sweeping historical account of evangelicalism may want to read the five-volume “History of Evangelicalism” co-edited by David Bebbington and Mark Noll and published by Inter-Varsity Press.
In volume 1, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, Mark Noll offers a panoramic view of the origins of evangelicalism. He begins by agreeing with the significance of the Reformation.
Martin Luther, the first great Protestant leader, proclaimed an ‘evangelical’ account of salvation in Christ over against what he considered the corrupt teachings of the Roman Catholic Church…In the heat of conflict, the positive and negative connotations of ‘evangelical’ multiplied rapidly:
• it stood for justification by faith instead of trust in human works as the path to salvation;
• it defended the sole sufficiency of Christ for salvation instead of the human (and often corrupted) mediation of the church;
• it looked to the once-for-all triumph of Christ’s death on the cross instead of the repetition of Christ’s sacrifice in the Catholic mass;
• it found final authority in the Bible as read by believers in general instead of what the Catholic Church said the Bible had to mean; and
• it embraced the priesthood of all Christian believers instead of inappropriate reliance upon a class of priests ordained by the Church. [p.14.] Continue reading “Who is an Evangelical? Part 2: Supplementary Notes”